Unquestioned Images In The Age Of Iconophilic Seduction

Unquestioned Images In The Age Of Iconophilic Seduction (2012)
Incidental Music To An Essay By Boris Groys

Synthesis Engine: Max/MSP
Duration: 64 minutes

I. Who commands the field of radical gesture ? Artist or Terrorist ?
II. Images of angst, cruelty, disfiguration
III. Destruction of old icons
IV. A video-taped ritual of humiliation
V. We cannot say that these images are not true
VI. Shock and awe
VII. A technique of symbolic valorization and devalorization
VIII. Icons of the contemporary collective imagination

Unquestioned Images In The Age Of Iconophilic Seduction is incidental music to Boris Groys’ essay titled The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror. The essay addresses a contentious division within the global media machine; it focuses on the purported elimination of the artist from the practice of global image production in the wake of the 21st century’s paradigm shift in the methods of cultural dissemination and consumption. The monumentality of images of war and terrorism are questioned against their implicit relational tendencies which find expression in avant-garde and radical art gestures. Together, these competing sources of radical images are analyzed in their relationship to the idea of the “political sublime”.